Your auto-explore idea doesn't demand any really interesting decisions. There is no emergent gameplay in this-- it takes the experience out of the hands of the player and rolls dice to determine their fate.
What kind of interesting ideas does the exploration in third person bears as far as the world map is concerned? From my experience from traditional roguelike games, it involves pressing the arrow keys or the numeric pad keys over and over (battles and fleeing scenes included) until luck or death hits you (roughly speaking ok?). I do understand that exploring a site like a cave or a dungeon in third person is the way to go but the world map? Unless I make it small and dense or graphically appealing as in Skyrim, it will be boring (personal opinion). Anyway, rolling the dice is what roguelikes are all about.
The idea of the game is to explore a huge world with tons of sites scattered throwout it (100k places to explore). Some areas will be empty others not. Now imagine being halted while in third person by bandits and wild life, as you try to explore a portion of land, just to realize at the end that that area was empty. Now imagine this happening 3 or 4 times in a row. Sure I could make it more dense but the current density is optimized for the auto-explore feature. This controlled density is made in a way to force the player to move farther and farther into unexplored territory, which can and will eventually become days, weeks and even months of traveling time from his home or from the closest city.
I fully understand condemning such feature because in your POV you think of just pressing a button and all is done. But no, it won't play like this, there is a bunch of things to consider before using auto-explore feature. First, you need to understand what type of land you're about to explore because it can be a dangerous place to go in at a specific time of the day, month, season or with certain weather conditions. You then define the pace at which you will explore it and define what you will be looking for. You will be able to actually define what each member will do during the exploration and if they should spread out to explore it way faster or remain together to increase their survival chances. Each choice shall bear an advantage and a disadvantage which only kin and careful players will sucessfully exploit.
Many events can be triggered during the exploration process like being ambushed or attacked by wild life, depending on the party skills that will tell who spots who first, giving the player the upper hand or a chance to evade an encounter. Other things will include unfortunate and fortunate consequences like falls and stepping on traps but also finding hidden treasure / items or special caravans carrying special cargo at a special price. Some situations will require player input to make important decisions like deciding if the exploration should be halted due to spotting a large enemy force or issuing shelter due to the weather changing, even though the area has been almost fully explored.
I do think that the auto-explore feature does carry interesting decisions to make, in fact I believe its WELL above the options present in traditional roguelike exploration sessions. In ADOM the only options I had when exploring the world map were either [F]ight or [E]vade an encounter, that was it.
But of course, each game is done with a specific game-play purpose in mind. I mean, a third-person world map exploration can be effectively done if using the right size and density or by using other game-play mechanics, entirely dependent (of course) on what the game tries to achieve. I just think it is not fair to condemn the auto-explore feature when so much can be added to it. Because what I see is few people trying the improve the concept while having most of you rejecting it without exploring its possibilities.
Please understand, this post is all about world map exploration, and not about the best method on how to explore a dungeon or a cave, which is what this thread is all about.
